Collected Stories by Henry James
‘My dear fellow, all that is idiotic.’ That had been Jackson Lemon’s reply; but it expressed but a portion of his thoughts. The rest was inexpressible, or almost; being connected with a sentiment of rage at its having struck even so genial a mind as Sidney Feeder’s that, in proposing to marry a daughter of the highest civilisation, he was going out of his way – departing from his natural line. Was he then so ignoble, so pledged to inferior things, that when he saw a girl who (putting aside the fact that she had not genius, which was rare, and which, though he prized rarity, he didn’t want) seemed to him the most complete feminine nature he had known, he was to think himself too different, too incongruous, to mate with her? He would mate with whom he chose; that was the upshot of Jackson Lemon’s reflections. Several days elapsed, during which everybody – even the pure-minded, like Sidney Feeder – seemed to him very abject.
I relate all this to show why it was that in going to see Mrs Freer he was prepared much less to be angry with people who, like the Dexter Freers, a month before, had given it out that he was engaged to a peer’s daughter, than to resent the insinuation that there were obstacles to such a prospect. He sat with Mrs Freer alone for half an hour in the sabbatical stillness of Jermyn Street. Her husband had gone for a walk in the Park; he always walked in the Park on Sunday. All the world might have been there, and Jackson and Mrs Freer in sole possession of the district of St James’s. This perhaps had something to do with making him at last rather confidential; the influences were conciliatory, persuasive. Mrs Freer was extremely sympathetic; she treated him like a person she had known from the age of ten; asked his leave to continue recumbent; talked a great deal about his mother; and seemed almost for a while to perform the kindly functions of that lady. It had been wise of her from the first not to allude, even indirectly, to his having neglected so long to call; her silence on this point was in the best taste. Jackson Lemon had forgotten that it was a habit with her, and indeed a high accomplishment, never to reproach people with these omissions. You might have left her alone for two years, her greeting was always the same; she was never either too delighted to see you or not delighted enough. After a while, however, he perceived that her silence had been to a certain extent a reference; she appeared to take for granted that he devoted all his hours to a certain young lady. It came over him for a moment that his country people took a great deal for granted; but when Mrs Freer, rather abruptly, sitting up on her sofa, said to him, half simply, half solemnly, ‘And now, my dear Jackson, I want you to tell me something!’ – he perceived that after all she didn’t pretend to know more about the impending matter than he himself did. In the course of a quarter of an hour – so appreciatively she listened – he had told her a good deal about it. It was the first time he had said so much to any one, and the process relieved him even more than he would have supposed. It made certain things clear to him, by bringing them to a point – above all, the fact that he had been wronged. He made no allusion whatever to its being out of the usual way that, as an American doctor, he should sue for the hand of a marquis’s daughter; and this reserve was not voluntary, it was quite unconscious. His mind was too full of the offensive conduct of the Cantervilles, and the sordid side of their want of confidence. He could not imagine that while he talked to Mrs Freer – and it amazed him afterward that he should have chattered so; he could account for it only by the state of his nerves – she should be thinking only of the strangeness of the situation he sketched for her. She thought Americans as good as other people, but she didn’t see where, in American life, the daughter of a marquis would, as she phrased it, work in. To take a simple instance, – they coursed through Mrs Freer’s mind with extraordinary speed – would she not always expect to go in to dinner first? As a novelty, over there, they might like to see her do it, at first; there might be even a pressure for places for the spectacle. But with the increase of every kind of sophistication that was taking place in America, the humorous view to which she would owe her safety might not continue to be taken; and then where would Lady Barberina be? This was but a small instance; but Mrs Freer’s vivid imagination – much as she lived in Europe, she knew her native land so well – saw a host of others massing themselves behind it. The consequence of all of which was that after listening to him in the most engaging silence, she raised her clasped hands, pressed them against her breast, lowered her voice to a tone of entreaty, and, with her perpetual little smile, uttered three words: ‘My dear Jackson, don’t – don’t – don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’ he asked, staring.
‘Don’t neglect the chance you have of getting out of it; it would never do.’
He knew what she meant by his chance of getting out of it; in his many meditations he had, of course, not overlooked that. The ground the old couple had taken about settlements (and the fact that Lady Beauchemin had not come back to him to tell him, as she promised, that she had moved them, proved how firmly they were rooted) would have offered an all-sufficient pretext to a man who should have repented of his advances. Jackson Lemon knew that; but he knew at the same time that he had not repented. The old couple’s want of imagination did not in the least alter the fact that Barberina was, as he had told her father, a beautiful type. Therefore he simply said to Mrs Freer that he didn’t in the least wish to get out of it; he was as much in it as ever, and he intended to remain there. But what did she mean, he inquired in a moment, by her statement that it would never do? Why wouldn’t it do? Mrs Freer replied by another inquiry – Should he really like her to tell him? It wouldn’t do, because Lady Barb would not be satisfied with her place at dinner. She would not be content – in a society of commoners – with any but the best; and the best she could not expect (and it was to be supposed that he did not expect her) always to have.
‘What do you mean by commoners?’ Jackson Lemon demanded, looking very serious.
‘I mean you, and me, and my poor husband, and Dr Feeder,’ said Mrs Freer.
‘I don’t see how there can be commoners where there are not lords. It is the lord that makes the commoner; and vice versa.’
‘Won’t a lady do as well? Lady Barberina – a single English girl – can make a million inferiors.’
‘She will be, before anything else, my wife; and she will not talk about inferiors any more than I do. I never do; it’s very vulgar.’
‘I don’t know what she’ll talk about, my dear Jackson, but she will think; and her thoughts won’t be pleasant – I mean for others. Do you expect to sink her to your own rank?’
Jackson Lemon’s bright little eyes were fixed more brightly than ever upon his hostess. ‘I don’t understand you; and I don’t think you understand yourself.’ This was not absolutely candid, for he did understand Mrs Freer to a certain extent; it has been related that, before he asked Lady Barb’s hand of her parents, there had been moments when he himself was not very sure that the flower of the British aristocracy would flourish in American soil. But an intimation from another person that it was beyond his power to pass off his wife – whether she were the daughter of a peer or of a shoemaker – set all his blood on fire. It quenched on the instant his own perception of difficulties of detail, and made him feel only that he was dishonoured – he, the heir of all the ages – by such insinuations. It was his belief – though he had never before had occasion to put it forward – that his position, one of the best in the world, was one of those positions that make everything possible. He had had the best education the age could offer, for if he had rather wasted his time at Harvard, where he entered very young, he had, as he believed, been tremendously serious at Heidelberg and at Vienna. He had devoted himself to one of the noblest of professions – a profession recognised as such everywhere but in England – and he had inherited a fortune far beyond the expectation of his earlier years, the years when he cultivated habits of work which alone – or rather in combination with talents that he neither exaggerated nor minimised – would have conduced to distinction. He was one of the most fortunate i
‘I am very sure of that; but it isn’t so simple – one’s being an American,’ Mrs Freer rejoined, with a little philosophic sigh.
‘It’s whatever one chooses to make it.’
‘Well, you’ll make it what no one has done yet, if you take that young lady to America and make her happy there.’
‘Do you think it’s such a very dreadful place?’
‘No, indeed; but she will.’
Jackson Lemon got up from his chair, and took up his hat and stick. He had actually turned a little pale, with the force of his emotion; it had made him really quiver that his marriage to Lady Barberina should be looked at as too high a flight. He stood a moment leaning against the mantelpiece, and very much tempted to say to Mrs Freer that she was a vulgarminded old woman. But he said something that was really more to the point: ‘You forget that she will have her consolations.’
‘Don’t go away, or I shall think I have offended you. You can’t console a wounded marchioness.’
‘How will she be wounded? People will be charming to her.’
‘They will be charming to her – charming to her!’ These words fell from the lips of Dexter Freer, who had opened the door of the room and stood with the knob in his hand, putting himself into relation to his wife’s talk with their visitor. This was accomplished in an instant. ‘Of course I know whom you mean,’ he said, while he exchanged greetings with Jackson Lemon. ‘My wife and I – of course you know we are great busybodies – have talked of your affair, and we differ about it completely: she sees only the dangers, and I see the advantages.’
‘By the advantages he means the fun for us,’ Mrs Freer remarked, settling her sofa-cushions.
Jackson looked with a certain sharp blankness from one of these disinterested judges to the other; and even yet they did not perceive how their misdirected familiarities wrought upon him. It was hardly more agreeable to him to know that the husband wished to see Lady Barb in America, than to know that the wife had a dread of such a vision; for there was that in Dexter Freer’s face which seemed to say that the thing would take place somehow for the benefit of the spectators. ‘I think you both see too much – a great deal too much,’ he answered, rather coldly.
‘My dear young man, at my age I can take certain liberties,’ said Dexter Freer. ‘Do it – I beseech you to do it; it has never been done before.’ And then, as if Jackson’s glance had challenged this last assertion, he went on: ‘Never, I assure you, this particular thing. Young female members of the British aristocracy have married coachmen and fishmongers, and all that sort of thing; but they have never married you and me.’
‘They certainly haven’t married you,’ said Mrs Freer.
‘I am much obliged to you for your advice.’ It may be thought that Jackson Lemon took himself rather seriously; and indeed I am afraid that if he had not done so there would have been no occasion for my writing this little history. But it made him almost sick to hear his engagement spoken of as a curious and ambiguous phenomenon. He might have his own ideas about it – one always had about one’s engagement; but the ideas that appeared to have peopled the imagination of his friends ended by kindling a little hot spot in each of his cheeks. ‘I would rather not talk any more about my little plans,’ he added to Dexter Freer. ‘I have been saying all sorts of absurd things to Mrs Freer.’
‘They have been most interesting,’ that lady declared. ‘You have been very stupidly treated.’
‘May she tell me when you go?’ her husband asked of the young man.
‘I am going now; she may tell you whatever she likes.’
‘I am afraid we have displeased you,’ said Mrs Freer; ‘I have said too much what I think. You must excuse me, it’s all for your mother.’
‘It’s she whom I want Lady Barberina to see!’ Jackson Lemon exclaimed, with the inconsequence of filial affection.
‘Deary me!’ murmured Mrs Freer.
‘We shall go back to America to see how you get on,’ her husband said; ‘and if you succeed, it will be a great precedent.’
‘Oh, I shall succeed!’ And with this he took his departure. He walked away with the quick step of a man labouring under a certain excitement; walked up to Piccadilly and down past Hyde Park Corner. It relieved him to traverse these distances, for he was thinking hard, under the influence of irritation; and locomotion helped him to think. Certain suggestions that had been made him in the last half hour rankled in his mind, all the more that they seemed to have a kind of representative value, to be an echo of the common voice. If his prospects wore that face to Mrs Freer, they would probably wear it to others; and he felt a sudden need of showing such others that they took a pitiful measure of his position. Jackson Lemon walked and walked till he found himself on the highway of Hammersmith. I have represented him as a young man of much strength of purpose, and I may appear to undermine this plea when I relate that he wrote that evening to his solicitor that Mr Hilary was to be informed that he would agree to any proposals for settlements that Mr Hilary should make. Jackson’s strength of purpose was shown in his deciding to marry Lady Barberina on any terms. It seemed to him, under the influence of his desire to prove that he was not afraid – so odious was the imputation – that terms of any kind were very superficial things. What was fundamental, and of the essence of the matter, would be to marry Lady Barb and carry everything out.
V
‘ON Sundays, now, you might be at home,’ Jackson Lemon said to his wife in the following month of March, more than six months after his marriage.
‘Are the people any nicer on Sundays than they are on other days?’ Lady Barberina replied, from the depths of her chair, without looking up from a stiff little book.
He hesitated a single instant before answering: ‘I don’t know whether they are, but I think you might be.’
‘I am as nice as I know how to be. You must take me as I am. You knew when you married me that I was not an American.’
Jackson Lemon stood before the fire, towards which his wife’s face was turned and her feet were extended; stood there some time, with his hands behind him and his eyes dropped a little obliquely upon the bent head and richly-draped figure of Lady Barberina. It may be said without delay that he was irritated, and it may be added that he had a double cause. He felt himself to be on the verge of the first crisis that had occurred between himself and his wife – the reader will perceive that it had occurred rather promptly – and he was annoyed at his annoyance. A glimpse of his state of mind before his marriage has been given to the reader, who will remember that at that period Jackson Lemon somehow regarded himself as lifted above possibilities of irritation. When one was strong, one was not irritable; and a union with a kind of goddess would of course be an element of strength. Lady Barb was a goddess still, and Jackson Lemon admired his wife as much as the day he led her to the altar; but I am not sure that he felt so strong.
‘How do you know what people are?’ he said in a moment. ‘You have seen so few; you are perpetually denying yourself. If you should leave New York to-morrow you would know wonderfully little about it.’
‘It’s all the same,’ said Lady
‘How can you tell? You never see them.’
‘Didn’t I go out every night for the first two months we were here?’
‘It was only to about a dozen houses – always the same; people, moreover, you had already met in London. You have got no general impressions.’
‘That’s just what I have got; I had them before I came. Every one is just the same; they have just the same names – just the same manners.’
Again, for an instant, Jackson Lemon hesitated; then he said, in that apparently artless tone of which mention has already been made, and which he sometimes used in London during his wooing: ‘Don’t you like it over here?’
Lady Barb raised her eyes from her book. ‘Did you expect me to like it?’
‘I hoped you would, of course. I think I told you so.’
‘I don’t remember. You said very little about it; you seemed to make a kind of mystery. I knew, of course, you expected me to live here, but I didn’t know you expected me to like it.’
‘You thought I asked of you the sacrifice, as it were.’
‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said Lady Barb. She got up from her chair and tossed the volume she had been reading into the empty seat. ‘I recommend you to read that book,’ she added.
‘Is it interesting?’
‘It’s an American novel.’
‘I never read novels.’
‘You had better look at that one; it will show you the kind of people you want me to know.’